🧑‍🤝‍🧑Player Driven Markets

At the core of a player-owned economy is a healthy player to player market. For a game the difference that this brings is enormous, hidden behind the simplistic “buying items from other players” lies a huge change to the way the game is played and progresses.

In a player to NPC/NPC to player market, where most games are, each player has its own economy, independent from each other. A single market unites all players in a single economy: the ability to trade amongst themselves allows for interdependency, the notion of value and specialization to emerge. Through trading the lowest ranking player will have access to the benefits of the highest end game players, for example, a newcomer will be able to buy weapons crafted by the highest ranking swordsmith.

Markets Balance Supply and Demand

Prices naturally reflect real supply and demand, utility and scarcity becoming the indirect controls over the item’s value from the part of the developers. As we will see further down, even those are also partially under the control of the players. As an example of the market dynamics providing extra motivation and engagement, imagine the item gold: if gold becomes scarce, its price rises, motivating players to mine more. As supply grows, prices stabilize again.

These natural market dynamics encourage players to adapt strategically. If demand for certain items rises, players shift their efforts toward producing those valuable resources. If demand falls, players invest their time elsewhere. This price allocation from the market is a great solve for any eventual supply issue. In crypto games, what we have seen up to this point, is that the market has driven supply up to the point where there’s too much of a good and, as demand falls, the prices go down and never recover. More about that later.